This week in On the Verge, USA TODAY's spotlight on breakthrough artists, Brian Mansfield talks to country singer Kelsea Ballerini.

Good way to have a wreck. The first time Kelsea Ballerini heard her single Love Me Like You Mean It on the radio, she had her steering wheel in one hand and her GPS in the other, trying to merge onto the interstate. "I turned it up, and it was awesome," says the 21-year-old country singer. Also awesome: Having Taylor Swift tweet about driving around with Ballerini's EP on repeat. Now Love Me Like You Mean It is No. 22 on USA TODAY's Country airplay chart and has sold 141,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Album The First Time is due May 19.

Can't trust a cow. Ballerini grew up near Knoxville, Tenn., on a small farm with three cows and a goat. She liked to play with the animals, though sometimes they didn't play nice. "I always thought it was a goat that kicked me over the fence," she says. "My mama told me the other day it was a cow. Now I'm sort of scared of both."

A gift that keeps on giving. A professed procrastinator, Ballerini wrote her first song for her mother because she hadn't bought a Mother's Day present. "I called it Oh Mama, and she loved it — she cried," Ballerini says. "For a while, I would write her another verse every Mother's Day."

Urban influence. Though she'd already begun writing songs, Keith Urban's 2006 single Stupid Boy drew Ballerini into country music. One can easily imagine Love Me Like You Mean It being sung to Urban's stupid boy. After Urban's record, she says, her songs started "coming from a place of confidence, whereas what I was writing before came from heartbreak."

Falling slowly, then all at once. She took 10 years of dance lessons as a child, so naturally other kids called her "Ballerini the Ballerina." In college, though, her nickname became "The Fainting Kitten." "There's a YouTube video of these two kittens that just fall over and pass out," she says. "My blood sugar's crazy, so I would pass out sometimes, like the fainting kittens."

A hard, Swift lesson. As a 14-year-old, Ballerini went to Nashville to meet with record labels. At her first appointment, she pulled her guitar out of its sparkly pink case and played a song, only to have an executive tell her, "Don't you know there's already a Taylor Swift?" "I thought it was the meanest thing anybody could ever say to me, and I canceled my second meeting and went home," she says. "It ended up being the most valuable lesson I could have learned that early: not to be a voice that's already a voice, to find what you want to say and how you want to say it."